The Gtk+ team is working on a roadmap to structure the development process of the Gtk+ 3.0 release and to open up the involved decision making progress. The first draft has been sent to the devel mailing list, and is now open for debate. Coincidentally, the draft roadmap also provides a nice overview of the features and changes planned for Gtk+ 3.0.

Widgets are themeable, so if combo box in GTK+ looks too big to you, you you're using a theme that's not suitable to you. Again, that's not GTK+'s fault.

For the white space, one of the suggestions for GTK+ 3.0 is themeable padding. That would probably mean that people who like crammed, crowded GUIs could use a theme with smaller padding.

Widgets in GNOME GUIs are definitely not thrown there without any thought. They are thrown there according to the official GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, which is a very thoughtful piece of work (by far the most professional GUI guidelines in the free software world, comparable perhaps to the Apple Mac OS X HIG).

And I am not talking about Abiword. You either talk about GNOME, GTK+ or Abiword. Those are three completely different things. If Abiword's GUI is bad, it's Abiword's fault. It is perfectly possible to make a toolbar with tiny little icons and buttons in GTK+. The Abiword developers did not make such toolbar. Nothing to do with GTK+.

Ok well in my own opinion, the widgets of the GNOME's top panel look quite unprofessional. The positioning of the icons next to "Applications Places System" look like they are out of proportion. This also applies to panel icons when you create a new panel. I just can't describe it but there is something very dull about it. Let me show you what I mean. Look at this screenshot I found:

Pay attention to that Konqueror window. Look at its toolbar. Can you see how neat the toolbar icons are as well as the toolbar itself? It's got borders, separators and the spacing of each icon is equal between each icon. The icons are centered. The text is centered. The top and bottom of the text of the icons is on the middle of the icon. Now look at this screenshot:

Look at the icons next to the menu bar! It looks like they have been thrown without any thought put into it! I hope people can understand what I mean when I talk about ecstasy! Now don't get me wrong, I do not favor one DE over another. I could have used a Windows screenshot here. I just wanted to demonstrate ecstasy in design.

Pay attention to that Konqueror window. Look at its toolbar. Can you see how neat the toolbar icons are as well as the toolbar itself? It's got borders, separators and the spacing of each icon is equal between each icon. The icons are centered. The text is centered. The top and bottom of the text of the icons is on the middle of the icon.

That's not Konqueror. It's Swiftfox, a Firefox variant, and it uses GTK+ on Linux. It's a GTK+ toolbar.

This oppinion of HUGE buttons on GTK is a misleading wording and customs.

Windows (and KDE which tries to resemble it) makes the buttons more compact. I am not gonna argue if is good or not, but when you go to a theme that say: 6 pixels around you text to be blank, and 12 pixels around button to be again blank, you will see around 20 pixels around buttons. Do you know what is the worse? When you go back to Windows: you will see that buttons are not put in the same 12 pixels place, and you will click wrong...

So is a different philosophy. Want to know small toolbar based on GTK? Nokia tablets which use Maemo have small widgets. N770 was first of them.

About big buttons in menus/toolbars in Ubuntu, I'm kinda agree but also I think that is a very good approach: a person with lower skill on pointing a button will hit it more probably than a small button.

Looking ugly on you: don't use!

One last thing that you've got an image about how great/bad are looking are some things to you: you: you use KDE and KDE till KDE 4 HAVE NO HIG, means no standard UI. Fully agree that buttons were smaller, and it can apply even to your GTK applications. But you miss the point: GNOME is mainly an UI for dumb users. I had loved KDE 3 at it's start, but when I jumped to GNOME, I had found one thing: the UI is invisible to me, I rarely click wrong a menu button or a button, and even I have something really hard to lose: I make a reflex to click OK or Cancel, because of their placing...

Going to Vista for instance, you will hate the day you are there: nothing match! Take for instance: Desktop->Properties and you will see a lot of mess, continue with Control Panel and Media Player, IE and Explorer.

Look at the icons next to the menu bar! It looks like they have been thrown without any thought put into it! I hope people can understand what I mean when I talk about ecstasy! Now don't get me wrong, I do not favor one DE over another. I could have used a Windows screenshot here. I just wanted to demonstrate ecstasy in design.

That has nothing to do with any lacking in GTK. The position and icons you are pointing out and are completely configurable. Just because the panel lets you put ugly ass icons on the panel in that way doesn't mean you have to. You can use another icon set, and space the icons however you want and even add separators. You don't even need to put any icons there at all if you don't want to.